I’m sweating. My breath is more ragged than normal, blood thumping through my body. Pink and flushed, head back against the wall and eyes closed, counting my breath back under control and realigning the pull of muscles against my spine. This is me, engaged in the deeply spiritual practice of Nudging.
{nudging}
verb
in order to attract attention touch or push gently or gradually coax or gently encourage
(in Nordic nugga, nyggja ‘to push, rub’.)
It’s also me, returning to the boxing gym after 6 weeks away, 3 weeks of medication and surgery. My body is usually stronger than this but normal slips away quickly if you don’t keep your rhythms. So I’m nudging because returning to the same place I was isn’t enough. I want to see how much further I can go. A little more sweat, a little more stretch, a few more rounds. Nudging: to see how far you can go. Nudging to see what more you can wring out of your body, your mind. In the gym, it looks messy. At higher reps my form gets untidy as I get tired, my cheeks impossibly pink.
And my trainer says, ‘C’mon Tash, we’re giving it a nudge.’
What exactly is a Nudge?
Picture a pile at the precipice of a cliff and you’re standing behind it. Looks like it might fall but how do you know? You give it a little nudge. A gentle push, a little coax in the right direction. When you give something a nudge, you look to see whether there is an opportunity for movement. In the animal kingdom, this pattern is external – one elephant nudges the smaller elephant in the right direction.
Sailors look for the ripple of the right wind on the surface of the ocean and watch the currents the birds drift on. When you see a glimmer of wind that might take you in the right direction, you nudge the pilot’s wheel in the direction of the wind and see whether you can catch some speed.
Our approach to our own transformation might be better described as ‘discovery’.
nb: nudging is not nudge theory, a human behaviour theory about decision-making that is sometimes used for political and social manipulation, but there is certainly some truth in the observations of how we might cognitively improve the outcomes we seek.
I have practiced Nudging for a long time now. Expending a small amount of energy to see where there is opportunity for growth and movement.
You will might oscillate a dozen times in your life between striving for change or avoiding it, but transformation is the only way to grow. We don’t change completely overnight but in a series of small, incremental steps. I watch my 7 month old niece and her transformations, each so small and easily overlooked, seem a wonder to me. But in my mirror, I want to see broad, sweeping changes. We’ve embraced the glamour of grand reveals and 180 degree changes as the right kind of story.
But our neural wiring simply can’t keep up with the reprogramming when we try to change too much, too fast. Whether our habits, our thought processes, our rhythms of the day – it’s easy to overwhelm our physical and neural systems. We need to think big but step small so we don’t work against our True Selves in the work of transforming.
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” – Parker J Palmer
Parker Palmer speaks to this disconnect between how we see our autonomy in the process of transformation. Nudging is a beautiful way of giving intent to your transformational desires and goals, but allowing the rhythm of your life to work with you. Nudging gives you a chance to see where the wind and movement of your life is leading you and work with it, not against it.
Our ideas about transformation are often too concrete – we do not enter into the process of transformation without an end goal or expectation of what transformation will look like. But the pumpkin looks nothing like the seed from which it comes. Nor the fruit of the apple tree resemble the seed or the tree.
Our approach to our own transformation might be better described as ‘discovery’.Much like sailing into the wind to see what happens, we listen to our life and begin the process of transformation to see what might happen. What might our tender, wondrous little changes result in? What wonder might our small lives contain if we allow the change to happen?
We need to think big, but step small.
So how do you Nudge?
First, nudging is about giving attention. Sometimes there are aspects of my physical, intellectual, emotional or spiritual self that need some movement. Attention creates space. Like #100days of simply paying attention to what was in front of me each day, an opportunity for creative intervention.
Sometimes nudging is about pushing gently and gradually. This month, I am pushing a bit harder, giving more than what I usually give in the gym to reach a new pinnacle of strength and flexibility. I’m giving it a nudge literally, to shift the dial on strength, energy and output from my physical self. When I push, I push first in the direction of what I know is already working in my life.
And sometimes a nudge is about wooing, coaxing and encouraging myselfand others to new movement. I’m trying to read a philosophy or ideological work each month that is useful for me and others. It’s just a nudge for my spiritual and communal self to embrace new ideas. I engage with my desire for transformation and my frustration through embracing new ideas and ways of thinking about what’s in front of me.
When I am nudging, things get sharper. New ideas nudge old habits and both get clearer. My spiritual practices don’t get overhauled, they become fine-tuned. My horizons and understanding expands, given permission to explore and discover.
Slowly and gently pay attention to your life. There is something to learn in every aspect of it. Don’t be afraid to enter into transformation with just a nudge to see what may become of your willing self. Nudge and discover what might come.
Want to join me in a Nudging journey? Let me know the space you want to nudge in and we can journey together.
I didn’t feel very brave. I’d just confessed that I hadn’t done the job I was meant to do and more importantly, why I hadn’t done it. I thought it was morally wrong as well as a waste of time. So I hadn’t done what I’d been asked to do and now I was paying the price for pretending. But I have always been brave in the art of honesty and confessing.
‘Brave would have been saying no and what I thought in the beginning, I think,’ I replied ‘instead of pretending like I was sometime going to get around to it.’
‘Maybe. But it doesn’t change how brave you were in the last five minutes. You just faced it head on. I couldn’t do that, whether I was in the right or the wrong.’
Maybe it was that I thought I had nothing left to lose but she was right, I was brave. I am brave.
Brave is not all of me, but it is a significant part. And when she said it, I recognised myself in a dozen different instances from age 4 to 19 years old. The brave girl who has learned to say what she thinks.
If your True Self is a muscle that flexes at a mere trigger, you feel the energy that displaces as soon as that muscle engages. Recognition. You recognise yourself in the moments you think and act out of your Truest nature. Our most True Self is the one who emerges when we are free to form our own shape instead of pushing ourselves into other shaped boxes.
Important side note: there is a difference between what feels familiar and what we recognise. We are drawn to the familiar because it feels known, we see patterns we know and out of habit, we understand how to respond and operate within that system or construct. Often these patterns of familiarity draw us back towards what has been, rather than what might be.
Recognition is as precise and distinct as a puzzle piece, with only one place that precise shape and colour way can fit. A distinct and necessary part of the puzzle that is you. Your life is the same – the tasks and situations that my hands were made for, where my voice has the most resonance, where my words make sense.
rec·og·ni·tion ˌrekəɡˈniSH(ə)n/ noun
the action or process of recognising or being recognised, in particular. synonyms: identification, recollection, remembrance
identification of a thing or person from previous encounters or knowledge.
acknowledgment of something’s existence, validity, or legality. synonyms: acknowledgement, acceptance, admission
Lately, I’ve been recognising myself again. In moments of a little freedom or when back in wide open spaces – the brave, courageous girl comes rushing back out. I have to be brave again, because being my brave self is key to getting back on the path to my life.
The girl who wants to change the world. She is fully connected to her wisdom and knows that her voice resonates and travels on the wind to the far corners of the earth. She feels the permission of the universe to be Other and her otherness is empowering. She feels engaged to her sensual, epicurean self. She has been leaning into her True Self wherever she recognises her and remarkably, it feels like the world is leaning in towards her too.
I’ve gone on a journey the last few years of trying to follow a script that isn’t my own. Granted, I’ve followed it in my own weird way but here I am, with a list of lessons and skills I’ve learned and an aching heart to get back to being myself.
The Brave within me is relentlessly hammering at the cage of my skeleton, the muscles flexing to make themselves known.. there is more. Not more success or more fame, more fortune (in fact, that is the least likely outcome) but more of ME. There is more of myself waiting to come out and be useful, meaningful and beautiful in the world.
Perhaps it was Mother Superior in The Sound of Music who said it best: ‘You have to live the life you were born to live.’
So I’m listening to myself, recognising the Brave and letting her be, Myself. True Self. Steve Jobs once said ‘Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.’ I think Steve was right. I know who I want to become and I have some ideas about the how and what and the why.
Embracing again, a truth I have always known and recognised a dozen times as it has come to me – I’ll make my own way through this world, not bound to follow a path or a script written by anyone else.
That’s how you know you’re recognising it – because your instinct is to lean into the spaces your True Self fills. And the more of your True Self you lean into, the more of your False Self you fall out of.
That is the life I recognise. The one my heart and intuition knows. Once you begin to recognise yourself and give voice and space to that person, you begin to recognise your life. It happens all at once; a collusion of what is happening within us and around us and all we have to do is pay attention to what we recognise.
My body knows. There are some people I am naturally drawn towards. It’s easy to share affection or to want to be close. There are others I don’t want to touch me at all. My body knows who belongs and who doesn’t and I let my body tell me, all the time. I follow her instincts and she does not let me down.
My heart knows what matters most and if I’m not paying attention, it will bang away inside my heart cage of rib & lung until I listen and spend some time there.
My spirit and soul know when I am my True Self and when I am not. They war against me when I stay too long inside a box that’s not for me. They stretch out for the open spaces constantly. They have been warriors within me and for me these last few years as I have been learning. Now they are clamouring and dragging my attention back to the path.
The body knows. The heart knows. The spirit and the soul knows. Recognition has us instinctively leaning in. Our self whispers ‘more of that, more of that, more of that’.
You recognise your life sometimes before you know you have it; reaching effortlessly for the pieces that belong. The places and the people who fit just so into your puzzle pieces and before you can blink, you are living and fully alive.
That’s how you know you’re recognising it – because your instinct is to lean into the spaces your True Self fills. And the more of your True Self you lean into, the more of your False Self you fall out of.
I have recognised fragments of my life a dozen times over. Places, moments and people who have fit into the puzzle, tasks that have been my truest self, lessons that have refined me not restrained me. I hold on to them, I’ve let them become anchors because I know they fit. I haven’t always known how and I don’t pretend to now. But I know they belong.. I recognise my life when I see it.
There are times I’ve mistaken familiarity for recognition.. but those things have just been a shadow, a watercolour of my true life. I’ve quickly learned to let them go but not without pain. It’s the dream we chase because we know we need to chase it, even though the first, third and fifth attempts might fail. We persevere and strive towards the life we recognise, the one we are writing for ourselves.
So here is the lesson, here is the big Brave of this next step in the journey. Recognising my true life and when I see it, leaning into it.
(the opening image credit belongs to David Hayward, whose art has been a constant companion and source of wisdom in my journey)
Not done yet: but instead always onwards, upwards and downwards on the journey of life.
This is harder than it sounds. But if there is within you some ache, frustration or desire that will not rest – you are not done yet. Fight for your life, through the pain not against it.
If it hurts, if you cannot numb it with distraction then you are in the graft. The part where your existing roots are weaving with, growing into and assimilating the new, organic life ahead of you.
In a greenhouse, the master gardener painstakingly grafts one plant to another. One stem to a stronger stem, one variety to another. Shaping and bending organic matter to stronger, newer and previously unseen beauty. To do it, there must be wounds, in order to splice new life onto old.
The wounds bring new beauty eventually. Your job is to show up to the bittersweet pain every day for as long as it takes to be made new.
If it’s important, someone – you – will need to bleed for it. Whatever your life looks like. Sometimes your fight to get there will actually look like surrender. Not to futility or hopelessness, but the ache that so often accompanies Hope.
Often, we fight our greatest battles by choosing to relax and embrace the hardest moments until we learn what we need to from them. Nothing is wasted.
Do not fight the pain in your life but don’t magnify it either. Let pain do it’s work in you; a sign of life to come. A message of reminder: you are not done yet.
My dreams, desires and hopes are sometimes so large the corresponding wound feels too deep. But it only lasts a moment, like stepping with bare feet onto a gravel path. I learn to walk, limping, on paths I otherwise would not traverse. I strengthen muscles and stretch new ligaments. Pain accompanies growth.
Do not give up; dear ones. Let your courage rise and fight for your life, found on the gravelly, ascending hill paths. When shaken, find your footing again. Deflated, breathe deep into your lungs and keep walking.
Do not give up, do not fight against the pain; fight with it and through it for your life. Hold onto your graft.
Kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawanui (be strong, courageous, be steadfast and willing).
In times of grafting, I often to return to texts and books that have helped me accept and journey with pain in healthy ways. They may be helpful to you.
“But what if, this time?”, the question echoes in my mind.
The silence in response is the same echoing kind.
I can ask the same question in half a dozen repetitive ways. “Why not, this time, this love, this job, this circumstance?”
I’ve given up on trying to get the question right because I’ve figured out it’s the wrong question to get an answer for. I’m beginning to accept the Universe doesn’t need for me to understand why not, at least not yet. And the day may never come, as so many of us who live with unanswered questions know. If there was an answer to be understood or learned for why my ‘What-Ifs’ have not become ‘What-Is’, I would have found it by now.
I’m not mad about it, just sad about it. It’s Anticipation Sickness, the same illness the ancient prophets and poets wrote of. Hope deferred makes the heart sick but unavoidably, Hope rises and the question, this time just a whisper, echoes again.
“What if, this time?”
An Optimistic Idealist.
We are our own worst enemies at times. A consumption generation collecting toys and experiences, living in a near-constant state of ‘What-Next?’ I, a Futurist and optimistic idealist, am guilty of living always with one eye on the future. It means hope and anticipation of What-Next is constantly simmering away within me, because I wonder if each step is taking me closer to this time, being the exact time my dreams fall within my grasp.
There is a lot of terrible, unhelpful advice available on the subject of dreams.
You have to be bold and grab hold of them. You have to be patient and let them go. You have to make them happen for yourself. Network with people and influencers who will help you. You need pray harder/meditate more / visualise more. Do everything you can do and then do more. If it’s meant to be, it will happen. When you stop trying, that’s when it will happen. Just relax and let it be. Just accept yourself / your circumstance and then you’ll find peace.
I have done all of these things – bought plane tickets and chased my dreams halfway around the world. I’ve done it over and over again. I’ve let it go and let it go again, burning candles and memorabilia. Not just one dream, but several of them. But I’m still left sitting with the question and with that unbearable feeling of Anticipation Sickness welling up within me.
What if, this time? What if I’ve finally learned the lesson that would make me ready, climbed the obstacle that kept me stuck or I’ve become good enough or strong enough or pretty enough. Maybe, finally this mysterious timing and God’s good will has finally caught up with me.
Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’
A friend said sometimes we are presented with our hope over and over again because in our despair, loss and heartbreak, we learn something we needed to know. She’s right and yes, I have learned deep and good lesson from the heartbreak of hope lost. I know there is truth in that statement but I struggle to accept it as the entire truth – because it doesn’t ring true with my experience. Sometimes all I have learned in the losing is to persevere. But how many times do you need to learn that lesson, before it turns bitter? Surely the Universe has gentler, kinder and more creative ways to teach us that destroying us over and over?
Still, we teach resilience and embrace courage to be vulnerable and to try again, despite our heart-pounding and questions. I am facing my own heart-pounding What-If questions again. Hope comes racing back to the surface and emerges in my late-night sub-conscious, as if the day-dreams weren’t unmanageable enough.
This combination of hope and anxiety can be crippling. And that’s anticipation sickness. Knowing the risk you take to hope at all, knowing what losing hope will feel like, how our way of seeing the world will be again challenged. It’s the fear and anxiety that overshadows joy. Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’
It’s anxiety in disguise, the kind only known by those who have experienced loss and disappointment. If you have lost hope and yet hoped again, you know what anticipation sickness is. You know the dread feeling of all you might lose again. So it’s hope and heartache all over again and the world clamours at us, with bad advice and little empathy.
It’s lonely, because everyday hopeful circumstances for everyone else , are not that simple or black-and-white for us.
Montaigne sings “Heartbreak / Feels like an old dream / Feels like a demon / I cannot shake him / I’m not afraid to fall / I am still standing here after all / I didn’t die / That’s my consolation prize / I am alive / That’s my consolation prize.”
At times in my life, I have found myself unable to live in my current reality because it felt hollow and empty in comparison to the dream. But the dream is just a possibility. No matter how I reach for it, I cannot touch it or make it a real thing. No matter how I have tried. In my darkest moments, life has felt like a consolation prize, a next-best-option while I wait for the real thing.
Ask A Better Question.
Replace ‘what if?’ with ‘what now?’ and you’ll find a pathway to living in What-Is, the Present.
‘Whatever you have in your hands, that’s your responsibility.’
Nothing more, nothing less. What you have in your hands is now. You cannot hold the past, you only carry the lessons with you today. You cannot hold tomorrow either. What you have is ‘now’. And that is all you need, it’s all you actually have capacity for. Just today. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what is in your hands.
What-Is stands exacting when What-If is hard to define. My heart, sick yes, with hope deferred and endless wondering of “what if?”, is not so inclined to trust. My disappointed heart is coaxed back to trust again by the experience of the present. I fiercely drag myself back to that brightly-lit day. What now, today?
How To Move Forward The best strategy is just a plan, with a little understanding behind it. I’ve learned a strategy for being present today while moving towards the future is to break everything down into the tiniest steps. Most dreams will take months, years, even decades to eventuate. So when living day to day, it’s easy to feel dejected and that you’re not moving forward at all. But you can take a tiny step in a day. Today, you can do one thing to move you closer to where you want to be. A piece of research, downloading an application form, reaching out to the one you’ve been waiting to hear from. Making the call you don’t want to make.
The Creative Spirit does not jest with us, not once, and understands the fragile human heart. The Universe does not crush our hopes nor tease us without mercy, nor hide themselves from us. We just go looking in the wrong place for God in the future, when God is present in the Now, in the What Is. Present is the only place to find peace in the wake of Anticipation Sickness caused by what we hope for, what we long for, what may yet be.
What-Is is I Am, I Was, is Ever Will Be What-Is the moment and the day, present pressing us closer to the Light revealing masterwork still barely seen, the ripples in each day but at a distance of some What-Was,
the vast, expansive movement of Love is bright. What-Now becomes again joyful, no consolation prize.
I’m coming to the end of the #100days project, which began on August 1, 2016 and will finish on November 8th, 2016. People have been asking, what this project has been about. You’ve seen glimpses.
Here’s an explanation and a question of sorts.
How long does it take to grow? The answer is: forever, like the largest, oldest tree that grows inch by inch into tomorrow.
Live long enough and you will learn there are different ways to grow. Some might grow tall, straight and true towards the sun, unstoppable and with unchanging trajectory. Some still straight but with no idea which way their roots go beneath the soil. Some grow wild and unruly. Some will grow entirely shaped by the elements they face, windswept by westerlies until their canopy echoes the curve of the ridge top. Some will drag life out of stony rockface and make a rambling home there.
But if you have the desire, you can choose the way you grow. You can learn how to learn and how to transform. It’s a strange paradox that transformation is how we get from back to our truest selves after the world has demanded how it wants us to be.
How long does it take to grow? The answer is: no time at all, if you know what you are measuring. I count seasons and especially springtimes, moon cycles and sleepless nights. I know the time it takes to let resilience do its work on the way back from disappointment, I measure the slow creep of desire and how it unravels the truth from us.
How long does it take to grow? The answer is as long as it takes to tell the truth; about yourself to yourself and for yourself.
A gardener can take a bonsai tree and determine the final form it will take. Working with organic growth and guiding it with an artistic eye.
A designer will take elements of shape, weight, colour and purpose and bring these otherwise unrelated ideas together into a single, sometimes multiplying form.
We grow by design, taking lessons intentionally and unintentionally. All growth is transformation but not all transformation takes us back to truth; that finicky balance of awareness and self-awareness. Knowing how the world is around us and how we are in the world.
I began #100days because I was seeking transformation. Having encountered within myself some deep knowledge, an awareness of something underneath the surface of my skin longing to find the light – I had to find a way to guide it out.
So for #100days, I have simply paid attention, observed and written down what I have seen, what I have learned, how I have changed. I have been intentionally focused not on what is outside of me, but what is within me that ought to come out.
It has not been one hundred days of a single activity or focus, like an extended Lent. It has been an exercise in letting my inner self tell a story to my outer self – my soul compelling my mind to listen. Because we must learn how to learn and keep learning even when we are in the midst of a repeating machine. There is something in our souls that longs to reach up to the sun and something in our roots that calls for deeper earth.
The heart can be deceitful in many things and your mind will overwhelm you with anxiety if you let it run free. But if I let my soul speak, that which searches out meaning in the world and listens to both heart and mind – I find my way to transformation.
It is Day Ninety. Today I am noticing how much changes in a year, just by opening your life to new experiences. What new bravery I have discovered within myself and what a beautiful new nuance to my voice, even if I alone appreciate it.
The hardest parts of labour are the moments immediately before birth. The last few days have been hard. These snippets of storytelling have encountered moments of joy, hope, sadness, journey, gratitude and mystery – I have measured my growth in the ability to notice and pay attention to the greater story being told around me.
I wanted to share it, because I wanted to see if I could observe and learn something inspiring or hopeful or useful every day. Here’s to your companionship on the journey with me and to whatever is growing and transforming within you.
Tash McGill is a broadcaster, writer and strategist who works with people and organisations to solve problems and create transformation. She believes people are the most important thing and that stories are powerful ways of changing the world. You can find out more at tashmcgill.com or by visiting her LinkedIn profile.